Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

American Way: Election season trumps fighting season as United States retreats from the world

Is the sun setting on American involvement in Afghanistan? US helicopters approach a landing site in Kunar province last December. photo: Toby Harnden

America is turning inwards. After a decade characterised by the War on Terror (or “countering violent extremism”, if you prefer) there is a new isolationism taking root that is dangerous both for the United States and for the world.

Last Wednesday’s Afghanistan speech by President Barack Obama was a strange blend of campaign pep rally and Orwellian doublethink in which a premature retreat was sounded and victory simultaneously redefined and proclaimed. It should have been an occasion for Republicans to smell blood.

Here was a commander-in-chief defying the advice of General David Petraeus and the rest of his military leadership. He decided to slash forces in Afghanistan by 33,000 in 15 months while barely attempting to explain what the strategy was for the remaining 68,000, pivoting instead to talking about the need for “clean sources of energy”.

Rather than allowing the “surge” troops he reluctantly committed in 2009 to remain for two Afghan fighting seasons, Obama decided to bring them home half way through the second in order to fit in with election season and his own attempts to cling onto his job.

Apart from a few trusty hawks like Senator John McCain, however, most Republicans were either missing in action or collaborating with what Obama was doing.

Grand Old Party presidential candidates were fearful of losing an election that will be about jobs and looking at polls which show two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan. They grumbled a bit and evoked Petraeus’s name but otherwise seemed keen to turn the page and move on.

During the recent Republican debate in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, an increasingly strong front-runner, pandered to the shift in public opinion by stating: “Our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.”

Mr Romney is a reliable weathervane. In the 2008 election campaign, he declared that “we ought to double Guantánamo”. Now, such sentiments are distinctly out of vogue.

Even worse has been Jon Huntsman, who said on the day he announced his candidacy: “I’m not sure the fate of our country is going to be determined on the prairies of Afghanistan. I think our future is pretty much going to be determined with our major trading partners.”

Let’s set aside the fact that “Afghanis” is the currency of Afghanistan rather than its people or that there are no “prairies” in the country. The real spectacle is Republican presidential candidates battling it out for the “Come Home America” vote.

The most egregious statement in Mr Obama’s speech was: “It is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” The trite slogan – the US is in full campaign mode now – ignored the fact that an American president is charged with managing the economy and protecting the homeland.

It is not an either/or proposition and, the global economic crisis notwithstanding, America can and should be able both to walk and to chew gum.

On Libya, Democrats and Republicans are in an even bigger mess. Obama’s policy of “leading from behind”, as one of his advisers inartfully put it, has ceded control of the campaign to oust Muammar Gaddafi to Nato allies who appear to possess neither the will nor the means to win.

Republicans, blinded by their dislike of Obama, are seeking to tie the hands of the US commander-in-chief, something they rightly railed against when Democrats sought to do the same to President George W Bush over Iraq.

They are also influenced by the Tea Party movement, which has a strong strain of deficit-slashing isolationism that is best personified by perennial presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul and his son Senator Rand Paul.

Some 87 Republicans joined Representative Dennis Kucinich, the loony anti-war Democrat, to vote to withdraw from the Libyan operation.

One irony of this slide towards a bipartisan Fortress America approach is that it comes in an era of a President who presented himself as an internationalist and a “citizen of the world” whose very presence in the Oval Office would be a global gift.

Another is that the Republicans clamouring to join Obama in what he calls “bringing these wars to a responsible end” are also invoking Ronald Reagan at every turn.

But it was Reagan who rejected neo-isolationism and declared: “The task that has fallen to us as Americans is to move the conscience of the world, to keep alive the hope and dream of freedom.” History, he said, “has asked much of us” and it was America’s role to respond. “Much we’ve already given; much more we must be prepared to give.”

Toby Harnden’s American Way column is published in the Sunday Telegraph each week.